


it's only a mistake if we don't survive

by Chiomi



Series: Measuring in Years [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Community: tw_holidays, Depression, F/M, Knotting, Loss of Virginity, Menstruation, POV Laura Hale, Sibling Incest, the kindness of strangers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-18
Updated: 2014-11-18
Packaged: 2018-02-26 05:05:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2639093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chiomi/pseuds/Chiomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura turns eighteen just before the Wolf Moon.</p><p>Laura’s only been eighteen for two days when her world burns down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's only a mistake if we don't survive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [verity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity/gifts).



> Mind the tags!
> 
> Thanks very much to the usual suspects for betaing.
> 
> This fic is sort of canon-adjacent to the webisodes, but does not adhere to their canon.
> 
> Title is from Natalia Kills' [Trouble](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hUP43YiyJc), and some thematic elements are from Natalia Kills' [Stop Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM39sNwStw8), even though they're period-inaccurate.

Laura turns eighteen just before the Wolf Moon.

Laura’s only been eighteen for two days when her world burns down.

She’s been eighteen a whole two months when everything’s sorted and they can leave. Derek doesn’t want to, but he’s miserable here, and Peter’s going to be unconscious probably until he dies, and Laura needs to run.

It’s another two months of running - cheap motels, because she’s got her finite insurance payment and a trust fund that she can’t touch until she’s 25 and no diploma, yet - and then they’re in Wisconsin. It’s humid with summer and full of mosquitos. She gets shot by hunters and has to see a human doctor and then they run again, farther east. They end up in Maine, as far from California as you can get in the continental United States.

It’s fall, but not quite biting, yet. Derek should be in school. Laura should be in school, too, but she was set to graduate a semester early. She doesn’t enroll either of them. They stay in a motel room for four solid days, wrapped up in each other and just breathing in pack. Derek isn’t talking - he seems to have given up on it. Laura can’t bring herself to care.

The moon changes things, as it always does. She shifts, all the way to wolf. She shouldn’t be able to, not with a pack of two, not with the bone-deep grief that’s killing her. But she does, and she runs, because there’s nothing else she can do.

In the morning, she’s got dirt embedded under all her nails and blood streaking her thighs. It’s a surprise: she hasn’t had her period since the fire, body shocked into some kind of stasis.

She showers for the first time since they got to Maine and goes out to buy tampons and breakfast. She hasn’t been a very good alpha so far - she doesn’t remember how long it’s been since they last ate. Resentment gnaws at her more sharply than hunger, because she shouldn’t have to be a good alpha, not yet, not for another couple decades, not until her mom retired. She’s too young for this. She’s just a kid. None of this is fair. She has cramps.

Laura buys a Caramello bar and eats it viciously as she drives back to the motel. Derek actually lifts his head from the pillow when she comes in, surprise in his bruise-ringed eyes. He hasn’t slept in a couple states, just sort of checked out and laid there with his eyes open and his heartbeat sluggish.

“Get up. You need to shower, and then we’re enrolling you in high school.”

He does as he’s told, gross basketball shorts hanging baggy off his hips. Laura heats four of the packaged biscuit and egg and sausage things in the microwave in the hall. It’s kind of gross, but it doesn’t smell of mold, and she uses the plastic wrappers as plates to stop the sandwiches touching the tray at all. By the time all of them are hot and leaking grease, Derek’s out of the shower.

She puts the plates on the dinky table, because they’ve done a lot of eating and wallowing in bed. “Eat.”

It’s primally satisfying to provide for her pack, in a way that’s all out of proportion to pack size and the difficulty of microwaving a thing.

Derek eats robotically, and she thinks that if she weren’t watching he wouldn’t bother. It’s a problem, but there are so many of them that it feels like a Jenga tower and tapping at the wrong one will bring it all down and crush them completely.

Their cell phones haven’t worked in weeks: they were on a family plan that there’s no one around to pay for anymore. “Put on real pants and a shirt. We’re going to the library.”

The Paris Public Library has a whole rank of public-use computers and a requested limit of an hour. Laura tells Derek not to leave and opens Internet Explorer. There’s still kind of a lot in her checking account, but it feels like nothing when she thinks about having to set up some kind of life. In that vein, she emails the high school. She only missed finals, and there were all these extenuating circumstances. She doesn’t think she can handle high school more if she can’t get her diploma; doesn’t know if Derek can handle at all. “Derek,” she says quietly.

He appears at her elbow, sharp-eyed enough that he has to have been bored out of his skull.

“Do you even want to go back to high school?”

He hesitates, then nods, and it’s strangely gutting, that he’d want to be apart from her. She takes a deep breath and dispels it. “Okay, you get on another computer and start looking at cheap apartments. I guess we’re staying a while.”

Laura goes to the bathroom to change her tampon and splash cold water on her face. She can do this. They need to move forward. She’s an adult now, an alpha, with a brother to care for. When she goes back, Derek’s got a bunch of windows open with Craigslist ads. They look over them together, and it’d be easy to get something with two bedrooms, give them a little more room to spread out, but the thought almost hurts. She doesn’t want him out of her sight. It’s reactionary and unhealthy, but knowing that doesn’t make it go away.

She writes down the phone numbers and areas for the apartments Derek’s found, and looks up where the high school is. They leave the library and get lunch at McDonald’s and then stop in: there are a couple kids in the office, waiting to see the principal, and they look disconcertingly young to Laura, like they’re from another century.

The administrator is unimpressed with them: unimpressed at Laura’s age, unimpressed that it’s taken so long, unimpressed that they’re in a motel. Laura has to pull the dead family card twice, and Derek gets progressively more quiet and miserable. Eventually they get him in, though, get him signed up for a jumble of whatever classes were open.

When they finish up, they both breathe deep in the parking lot, and Laura feels like she’s escaped some awful trial. “Soon as we get an apartment, we’re having steak.”

As they walk across the parking lot, already as cold in October as Beacon Hills ever got in January, Derek takes her hand, laces their fingers together, like they’re five again. They were only both five for a month, but there’s a bunch of approximate time that Laura remembers with sharp nostalgia. It was simple, being a kid. They’re Irish Twins, barely. Derek was a week early, and their grandmother joked once that it was because he wanted to be closer to his sister. They were close, when they were little; thick as thieves and always getting into trouble. They’d tried to invent a twin language, when they heard about them for the first time when they were eight and seven. It mostly consisted of Pig Latin and growling.

Derek’s been distant since Paige died, even since the fire, even when they were the only ones left. It’s good to be close again.

Laura drives back to the motel. They should probably school shop, or contact someone about an apartment, but she’s all out of ability to do anything. They order Chinese and eat it in their underwear, not speaking. The sun’s only barely gone down when they go to bed. Derek curls into a fetal ball with his head on her breasts, and Laura wraps her arms around him.

They don’t wake up until the alarm on Laura’s phone goes off, and her tampon has leaked all over her panties. She drags herself to the bathroom to clean up, then throws a pillow at Derek’s head to get him out of bed. They have stuff they have to do.

Laura drives them to the nearest mall, about half an hour away. She knows burner phones are a thing - she’s seen Law & Order - but she doesn’t know how to get one and set one up without looking like a drug dealer or something. But she knows malls, for all that they’re a concentrated assault on the senses. Malls have phone kiosks, and she can do kiosks.

Derek follows her into the mall, sticking close like a grumpy duckling, with their dad’s leather jacket hanging off his skinny shoulders. She gets them two phones, shiny new pink RAZRs, signs all the paperwork that looks way more complicated than she should be dealing with. She’ll get a job or something to keep paying for them and leave the insurance money in one piece.

They eat at the food court, and it mostly tastes like hot grease, but it’s fine. It’s warm, at least. Nothing’s ever going to taste like their mom’s meatloaf again. She programs their numbers into each other’s phones and gets out her notebook. She can’t make the calls in here, with mall noise in the background, but she needs to call a few different places today. They can’t stay in the motel forever. “Which one was your favorite?”

Derek shrugs, and looks uncomfortable, so she just sends him to Staples with her card and starts at the top, making calls from the car. There’s a man willing to meet with them that day, says it’s a really flexible start date on the lease, and it’s a two bedroom. She doesn’t think it’s too far from the school, either. They arrange to meet in an hour and a half, which should be enough time.

Laura makes another three phonecalls, and they’re exhausting. She has all this alpha energy under her skin, telling her she could run for years, but interacting with humans at all leaves her drained in a way she doesn’t really have words for. Derek comes back with a plain five-subject notebook and a graphing calculator and a pack of pencils and a pack of pens in a plain white bag. That’s it. Laura supposes that with an apartment, he’ll finally be able to empty the backpack he’s been using for travel stuff, use that for school. It makes her feel slightly adrift, even though it’s an end to drifting.

They go see the place, and it doesn’t smell like violence or cat pee, which is good enough for Laura. It’s the second floor of an older house, and the landlord lives on the ground floor. She cocks an eyebrow at Derek, and he quirks one back. Fine. “We’ll take it,” she says.

“There’s an application to fill out,” the guy says, and he’s eyeing them like he doesn’t expect them to be able to pay.

Laura nods equably and fills out his paperwork. She’s a bit nervous, but doesn’t let it show on her face. He’s probably running a credit check or something, and she doesn’t exactly have much of a credit history. It has a section for previous address, and she hesitates, then puts down Beacon Hills. When she’s done, she hands it over to him.

“Heard from Janine at the school that you kids were alone. You got a job?”

Laura shakes her head. “I can pay, though - there’s insurance -”

He waves her off, and part of her wants to bite his hand off for interrupting her. “I’m not worried. Tell you what, though - Mary at the cafe’s looking for someone part time, afternoons and weekends. It’s not good to be idle. She thinks you’re okay, you’ve got the place.”

Laura nods, confused and grateful. “I’ll go talk to her.”

They go to the cafe, and Mary’s the hostess slash only waitress there. She smells of yarrow and apple pie and coffee, and has orange hair. “Um, hi, Clive Johnson said you were looking to hire someone?”

Her eyes go sharp. “Come sit at the counter and I’ll get you some hot cocoa and we’ll talk.”

Laura prefers coffee, but she goes. Derek follows, of course. Mary sticks a plate of pie in front of him before he’s even firmly seated. “Eat up.”

Mary leans on the counter in front of Laura. “You ever waited tables before?”

“No,” she says. “But I learn fast, and I’ll work hard.”

“Mm.” The man in the kitchen dings the little bell on the counter, and Mary grabs two mugs topped with canned whipped cream. “You in school?”

“No.”

“Got any people out here?” The way she emphasizes people is strange, and Laura remembers Doctor Deaton’s yarrow treatments for everything.

It’s probably just some New England thing about family. It has to be. Still, she’s hesitated enough for it to be noticeable, which she feels bad about. “It’s just me and my brother.”

“Mm,” she says again. “It’d be Tuesday through Saturday, and eventually I’d leave you afternoons and just come back for dinner. Five an hour plus tips, and full moons and the day after off.”

Laura stares at her in icy horror, and swallows some of her hot chocolate. It’s good, not from powder. “Okay.”

“Good girl,” Mary says. “Hot chocolate’s on the house. See you tomorrow.” She disappears into the kitchen. There’s only one other person in the cafe, a man in the corner reading a newspaper, so it’s not like Mary has anyone else to pay attention to.

Laura looks at Derek, and he looks ready to bolt - he looks like she feels. But it’s a job, and Mary might know, but she didn’t smell like a hunter or any cloying perfume used to cover up danger. Laura tries to project calm, and puts her hand on the back of Derek’s neck. He tips towards her, like she’s his gravity, and she kisses the crown of his head fiercely. She can’t, anymore, unless he lets her. He’s too tall.

They finish their hot chocolate and leave. Laura calls Mr. Johnson and tells him she got the job. He says they can move in the next day.

“I don’t trust any of this,” Derek says.

“I know. They seem good, though, right?”

Derek looks at her miserably. “How would we even tell?”

It hurts, that he distrusts her judgement that much, but it’s a quicksilver thing, buried quickly under anger, which in turn is subsumed under exhaustion. “Let’s just get pizza.”

It’s only been a few hours since lunch, but all she wants is to sleep forever, even if sleep brings dreams.

They get an extra-large meat lovers to go, and the alpha senses are not a gift, because the tomato sauce mostly tastes like metal and overwhelming oregano. Bacon is the same, though, and it’s food, so whatever. Laura takes off her boots and her bra and eats her half on the bed. She drags herself out of bed to change her tampon and brush her teeth, then settles back in, her stomach almost painfully full. She falls asleep to whatever Derek has on the TV.

She dreams, as she usually does, of having a pack again. Sometimes it’s of her family being alive; sometimes it’s of them being resurrected, bloody and ashen and half-healed. Sometimes it’s of a new pack, built or bred or bitten. She dreams about biting people a lot, sinking her teeth into willing flesh and biting down until she tastes blood sweet and thick in her throat.

The bites don’t take in her dream tonight, and she’s left just as alone as before. In the way of dreams, she turns to her lover for comfort and for a longer-term solution. She dreams in vivid detail how perfect it would feel as he slid into her, and is uncomfortably aroused when his face resolves and she jolts herself awake. Her heart pounds, and she tells herself that dreams are stupid and brains are stupid and it didn’t mean anything, she wasn’t a gross pervert. Derek’s face is just the one she sees most often.

The excuses are well-worn, at this point.

Derek is curled next to her, his own bed perennially left alone, and Laura strokes a hand through his hair to calm herself down. He blinks at her, probably woken when her heartbeat spiked, and she smiles reassuringly. He burrows closer to her and winds his arm around her waist, puts his head on her chest. Her heart does - a thing, at having him so close to her treacherous heartbeat and still-taut nipples, but Derek just makes a sort of mumbling noise and slips back into sleep. He’s half-hard against her thigh, and it makes her feel more panicked and gross to think about it. She strokes his hair until she falls back asleep.

When the alarm goes off in the morning, they’re both dragging ass. It’s a good thing they don’t have much. Laura packs up all her stuff as Derek packs one bag for school and shoves the rest haphazardly in his duffle. It doesn’t all fit, but the rest goes into a shopping bag. It takes less than an hour to get ready to go, even packing up their whole life. They shove everything in the back of the car, and Laura drives Derek to school. She meets Mr. Johnson at the house, and writes a check and signs the lease and gets the keys. She takes their stuff up and puts their things in separate rooms, because that’s what normal siblings do.

Then she makes a list of what they need at a bare minimum. It’s not a long list, since the apartment’s furnished, though sparsely. There are beds in each room, a couch and a chair in the living room, curtains on the windows, a curtain in the bathroom that’s not even too gross. Shopping feels like a Sisyphean task, even though she’d liked it back in Beacon Hills, liked going to the little boutiques in Sacramento with her friends whenever they had an excuse.

But now she finishes her list and drives back to the damn mall and gets bed linen sets and towels and washcloths and a mat for the bathroom and comforters for both of them, and pillows, hangers, a pot and pan set. It fills up the back of the car, and she’s so exhausted she wants to cry. That’s not an option, though: she needs to drop this stuff off at the apartment and get to the cafe. She sits in the car for ten minutes, reminding herself that she’s the alpha, she’s an alpha fucking werewolf. Humans shop and work in the same day all the time, and she’s so much stronger and faster and more durable than a human, she can do this. She will not cry at the prospect of dealing with more people.

It pretty much works, so she’s only a little grim around the edges when she goes in to say hello to Mary. It’s the afternoon lull, so Mary has her sign paperwork, shows her how some stuff works, has her serve a customer while Mary supervises from behind the counter.

Derek shows up while she’s serving her second customer, goes to talk to Mary. By the time Laura’s put their order in, he’s ensconced in a back corner table, working on his homework. “Is it okay that he’s here?” she asks Mary anxiously.

“Better here than alone or out making trouble,” Mary says easily.

“Thank you,” Laura says, and it comes out a little pathetic.

She gives Derek his set of keys and asks how school was, but then the order for her table is up and she needs to get back to work. Derek stays at his table working until the end of her shift, when the cafe is closing and Mary’s showing her the procedures for closing up. Laura’s pretty sure none of it is going to stick in her head, because she’s dead on her feet. Mary sends her home with leftover soup and a couple of the bakery items that didn’t sell, and Laura could cry with gratitude, because it’s another two meals she doesn’t have to think about cooking. They go home and eat on the couch, and then sleep there, too, because Laura hadn’t made either of their beds earlier, and neither of them have the energy to do so now.

Laura wakes up with a crick in her neck from where she’s spent all night with her nose buried in the side of Derek’s neck as she lay on top of him, but it fades as she stretches. They eat leftover pastries, and then Derek showers and gets ready for school. Laura doesn’t bother getting dressed, just makes her bed and Derek’s as he gets ready. She’s having a goddamn nap when he’s gone.

She wakes up to the alarm she’d set to get herself to work and showers and puts on jeans and a clean v-neck. She goes to work, and it’s Friday, which apparently means more of an after-school crowd than just Derek. Laura actually ends up serving a bunch of people, and the high school students don’t tip _well_ , but they all tip. A couple of them try to talk to Derek, but she doesn’t see how that goes.

Friday is also apparently the night a lot of Paris goes out for dinner, so by the time they close, Laura is - well, okay, she’s always exhausted these days, but now she feels like she’s earned it. She even lets Derek drive them back to the apartment. She showers off the smell of other people and then they eat the lasagne Mary sent them home with. “You don’t have to come visit me every day, you know.”

Derek shrugs. “Better than being alone. I might join a club, though - the guidance counselor says that looks good on a college application.”

Laura feels a sort of swoop of loss and regret. She’d had an acceptance letter to Sac State, and both the letter and the acceptance are probably ash now. “Good. You should probably start doing those soon.”

They both start getting ready for bed, and it’s strange, lying alone on clean sheets that smell mostly of chemicals. Laura thinks she’ll fall right asleep, get in the twelve hours that have been her usual for months, now, but instead she can’t. She stares up at the ceiling for a good forty-five minutes before Derek pads in in his boxers, holding his pillow. Laura stares at him for a moment. They were going to be normal, and then maybe she’d stop with her dumb dreams.

Comfort is more important than normalcy, though, so Laura slides over and holds open the covers. Derek slides right in, and Laura doesn’t know why he bothered with a pillow, since he uses her arm as a pillow and buries his face in her chest as usual. Laura strokes his hair, and is asleep in minutes.

She dreams of Derek fucking her again, and of cubs that are pure Hale. She wakes up wet and hating herself, with Derek’s breath hot and damp in her cleavage and his dick hard against her thigh. He’s holding very still, and the room smells a little bit like sex. She pulls his head back by the hair - not hard, just enough to be clear about what she wants - and kisses him. It starts out violent, to punish them both for being in this position. But he doesn’t put up a fight, and his mouth is warm and pliant. She doesn’t think he quite expected it, either, which makes her feel worse, because if she’d misinterpreted he’ll just hate her. He kisses back, though, eventually, soft and uncertain.

Laura springs away and shuts herself in the bathroom to hyperventilate.

A couple minutes later, Derek comes to sit outside the door. He’s quiet about it, but they both know she can hear him.

“I’m sorry,” she says, when she can breathe again.

Derek stays quiet, and she realizes, with a sick jolt, that she’s put contextualizing it in his court, so he’s the one who has to tell his alpha and his only family that he hates her and thinks she’s gross. “I love you,” he says eventually. “I don’t care what you want that to mean.”

She sniffles, and blows her nose on toilet paper, and then goes to sit next to him in the hallway. She leans her head on his shoulder, even though she’s the alpha and should be the strong one. “I just want a pack again.”

“There aren’t any wolves here, but you could call Deaton? See if he knows any omegas -”

Laura shakes her head. “I don’t want outsiders.”

Derek goes still. “You want to bite someone?”

“No.”

Derek goes impossibly stiller, but his heart is beating wildly. He takes a couple of measured breaths. “Well, we’d make really hot babies.”

The reappearance of his sly, dry humor after so many months of miserable silence is so unexpected that Laura barks out a laugh. She feels shaky and terrified and lighter, and she stands and holds out a hand to help Derek up. “C’mon, we both need sleep.”

They curl up in her bed, and when Laura sleeps, she doesn’t dream.

In the morning, they go grocery shopping, which might be the worst mistake Laura has ever made. Apparently all of Paris goes grocery shopping Saturday mornings, so there are people everywhere. It’s awful. They end up getting some fruit and cereal and milk before they flee.

Laura has to go to work, and Derek’s still making his way through a mountain of makeup work. Laura hesitates on her way out. “Want to come with me?”

He shakes his head, and she leaves, feeling bereft that she won’t see him all shift. It’s the longest they’ve been apart since the fire, a whole eight and a half hours. She’s tempted to go home and see him on her lunch, but that would be demonstrably codependent, and they need to look normal, need to look human, especially if he wants to go to college. Determination and reminding herself that she’s the alpha are what get her through the dinner rush. When she gets home - with almost an entire pot pie, five an hour is going to stretch forever if Mary keeps feeding them like this - Derek’s not in the living room. He’s in her bedroom, and the entire apartment smells like he’s been jerking off.

Laura takes off her shoes carefully and sets the pot pie in the fridge. Her hands are shaking. The smell feels like a declaration.

When she goes into her room, Derek is watching the door, pale eyes lit up by the reflection of the streetlight outside. He’s naked, and holding Laura’s towel, which now smells like jizz. Laura’s period ended that morning, which he had to have smelled. So they’re doing this. They’re really doing this. Laura feels shaky and out of control in a way that has nothing to do with shifting, and she strips off her shirt. Derek watches her as she takes off everything else, and his eyes flicker down to her breasts when she takes off her bra.

As soon as she’s naked, he draws back the covers, and she can see that he’s already hard. She straddles him, lets his dick rest against her inner thigh, and just sits there for a moment, her hands on his chest. They haven’t done anything they can’t come back from yet. They could just pretend the last couple days didn’t happen.

Derek just looks up at her, his hands on her thighs. “Laura,” he says, sounding lost. He doesn’t say anything else.

She leans down and kisses him. Softly, this time. Their lips slide together perfectly, soft and warm, and she licks at the seam of his mouth. His lips part immediately, and she darts her tongue in. He tastes a little like toothpaste, but mostly he just tastes familiar, comforting.

Derek hasn’t moved his hands, like he’s not sure what he’s allowed to do, so Laura puts them on her breasts. He kneads them gently, then very carefully takes a nipple between his thumb and forefinger and presses. Laura stops kissing him to focus on that. He scoots down the bed a bit, and looks up at her inquisitively. “Can I?”

“Yeah,” she breathes, and shifts upwards, bringing her breast closer to his mouth. He sucks in her nipple, and it’s electric down Laura’s spine. She moans, and can practically hear Derek being smug. Her chest has always been sensitive, though the context for it before had been that he wasn’t allowed to punch her in the chest when they were sparring, not after she was twelve and needed her first training bra. He suckles and licks both of her breasts until she’s leaking arousal down her inner thighs. “Hey,” she says.

Derek pulls back and looks at her.

“You should fuck me now.”

Derek twitches under her. “How do you want to do this?”

“You on top,” she says without hesitation. Derek’s done this before; she hasn’t. It makes more sense.

They roll, and Derek scoots back up the bed and lines up his dick with her pussy where it’s bared by her spread knees. He pushes in slowly, his eyes on where they’re joined, and it’s not like what she dreamed at all, too close and immediate and real. Laura arches up to meet him, because he’s going too slow, and the friction and the way he feels all the way inside her are delicious. They fit perfectly, probably because they were made from complementary molds. Derek props himself with his elbows on either side of her head and kisses her messily as he slides back out. She wraps her legs around his waist and flexes her hips to bring him back in, and they settle into a rhythm. Laura’s coiling up towards orgasm when something changes: Derek’s dick feels wider, down at the base, and it’s less of a smooth glide for him to bottom out in her.

“Is that? Are you?”

There’s white visible all around his irises. “This hasn’t happened before. I can -”

He makes a move to pull out of her, and she tightens her legs. “No, fuck that, you’re knotting me. _Fuck_.”

He thrusts back in, and he can only thrust another couple times before he’s stuck. Laura still hasn’t gotten off, but she’s getting there, feeling this full. Everything is hot and tight. She doesn’t know how much more of his dick she can take. He grinds on her another couple times, and she clenches around him, and she can feel him go, both the full-body shudder he does above her and the influx of heat and wet deep inside her. She reaches down to touch her clit, because that’s how she usually gets off, and just a brush of fingertip is enough to set her off, spine going taut.

She comes down slowly, because Derek’s still filling her, tied to her, slowly pumping come into her. He’s collapsed on top of her, face buried in her neck, and she runs her fingers slowly through his hair. They fall asleep like that.

Laura wakes up early in the morning - way too early to be awake - and there’s come drying sticky on her thighs. She slips out of bed and showers, then sticks the pot pie in the oven. They don’t have a microwave yet. She’s starving, almost enough to eat it cold.

She leans into her - their bedroom, and says, “Food’ll be warm in a bit, if you want to shower.”

He does, and puts on boxers, and then they eat in the living room. Derek eats at least half of it, and she feels kind of bad that there’s not any real food in the house. “Want to try the grocery store again as soon as it opens?”

Derek shrugs. Laura takes it as the acquiescence it was probably meant to be, and starts writing a list. Top of it is dishsoap so they can do dishes and return all the stuff Mary’s sent home, but then there’s the steak she’d promised, and what’ll hopefully be enough to get them through a couple weeks without going back. They both put on real clothes and get to the grocery store when it’s still drearily pre-dawn and no one stocking the shelves or manning the checkout looks quite awake. They pick up books, too, in the cards-and-magazines-and-schlock aisle, because their apartment, unlike the motels they’ve been staying in, doesn’t have a TV.

They get everything done and go back to bed. They don’t have sex, just sleep until early afternoon. They don’t have sex again for a week, and Laura’s sort of starting to think it should stay a one-off and her dreams can shut up and go to hell, sex dreams and zombie dreams both. But Derek wakes up early, heartbeat through the roof and dick hard against her thigh, and Laura, less guarded half-awake, reaches down to cup it. “Want me to take care of that?”

Derek whines, “Please,” and Laura rides him until he knots her again, his mouth on her nipple. They stay stuck like that until it’s a rush to get Derek to school on time.

They don’t have sex every day after that, just a lot. It helps that they’re not sleeping twelve hours a day anymore, and some days when Laura wakes up she’d rather fuck Derek than sleep another few hours.

Her period’s late, and she’s torn between hope and terror and expectation that it’s just a return to her body being dysfunctional. It comes eventually, though.

They never buy condoms: they’re doing this, after all, to grow the pack.

Derek turns eighteen on Christmas, and Laura blows him, even though it’s nothing to do with procreation.


End file.
